Mosaic Fragments

Ze computer . . . is still dead. We thought we had it fixed, but apparently it is just unreliable, and it died after I sent my computer-fixer to the airport. :( I tried a few things, but the chances of it being resurrected before he gets back is pretty much nil. So any ambitious plans to skin, translate, or web design this winter break are out the window. *sigh*

Like I said before, it would be a good thing, if it kept me off the computer this break, so my limbs can recover before another semester, and then forever of being chained to a computer at a law firm. But more likely it will just lead me to do other wrist-bad activities on the laptop that are less productive because I don't have all of my workfiles.

So I think the thing that has the most potential for salvaging this break is excessive gaming. I ordered Eternal Sonata and Disgaea 3, and in the meantime I'm going to go back to Disgaea 1 for a bit. (I never completed the game a second time, so I still haven't seen the good ending -- I managed to forget a few times my first run through that thrown Prinnies explode, so I lost the good ending, for which you need to avoid killing any of your own people.) Item World, here I come! At 295 hours and level 1056, I think I still have quite a ways to go before I get an ultimate weapon, which is my current goal.

I hope Eternal Sonata allows for copious saving, because I've died a lot of times trying the demo. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it -- except the craptastic battle camera -- but once I no longer have the wait before my action timer goes down, I am so screwed. Shoulda practiced more on Kingdom Hearts...

I also ordered the Microsoft Natural Mouse I was going on about. I saw that it shipped today and was all excited about using it with my resurrected computer until I discovered that the computer was not-so-resurrected. :( But maybe it will help with wrist-death on my laptop.

[Yeah, I am still kind of recovering from the emotional roller coaster of thinking my computer was fixed only to hook everything up and discover otherwise. I am very attached to my electronics, yes, it is very pathetic. I am trying to make myself feel better by installing more crap on my laptop that I will probably be too lazy to uninstall when I start needing it again for class in January.]

In happier news, I am waiting for my sister to come home next Monday so we can go to Kinokuniya and pick up our special orders and (hopefully!) the new Geass artbooks. I went there last Friday to get a furoshiki to wrap the bottle of wine I'm giving my supervisor from clinic . . . and when I got home, I saw the postcard saying our special orders had come in. D'oh! But it works out because (1) they didn't have the Geass artbooks yet, so I have to go back anyway and (2) I forgot that I have 10%-off coupons for December and January. So, assuming they have the artbooks when we go back, I can pay for everything in one big purchase, and use the coupon, and it will be good. Previews of Mutuality, the CLAMP art one, make me piss my pants. So does just the cover image of Illustrations Relation.

And... well, someday, when I have a desktop computer again, and maybe a more ergonomic setup, I will make that skin, dammit.

My 120GB external harddrive is dead. I don't think it had anything extremely important on it, and now that I can remote desktop into my computer at school, I can access most of the grad school and other info that I had copied to bring home. But it had all of my OSTs and a good portion of my unwatched anime and all my music videos and some of my pictures and various other things I kind of want back.

It was working fine last night, but this evening I noticed that it wasn't on anymore. My power adapter has a green LED, which dimmed and flickered when I turned it on, which it didn't do before. There was no other response from the drive, so I thought it was a power supply issue like I had with my computer in the past. I opened the case up and we put the drive into my sister's computer, and ended up frying one of the chips on the logic board, apparently. [And when we put her computer back together afterwards, it would no longer boot up until I unplugged the floppy drive. In general I'm not as cynical as most people are about computers being incomprehensible and subject to Murphy's Law, but sometimes...]

I've been Googling around, and it seems like it might be possible to get the thing working again by just replacing the logic board, but there are lots of scary comments like it won't work unless it's from the same batch or something. My poor data. ;_;

Any advice from you computer savvy people on the friends list? The drive's a Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 120GB ATA/133, if that helps.